


Stories Across the Years

by devilinthedetails



Series: The Voice [2]
Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Bazhir, Bazhir Culture, Bazhir History, Bazhir Legacy, Being the Voice, Gen, Legends, myths, stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25920541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Ali and the stories he listens to and tells across the years.
Series: The Voice [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1881097
Kudos: 4





	Stories Across the Years

Stories Across the Years

Ever since he was small as a sand-lizard poking its reptilian head out of the shifting dunes, Ali had loved listening to stories. Instead of joining the other boys of his tribe in their sweaty horseback races against the wind and against one another that culminated in swimming and splashing at the nearest oasis, Ali would beg his father for tales of Bazhir battles against northern invaders. 

Wide-eyed, he’d listen to his father describe in glorious, gory detail the legendary victories and defeats of his people. Watching his father sharpen his knives against a whetstone and test the tautness of his bowstring, Ali believed what his father defiantly declared about Barzun not being dead despite what maps and King Jasson’s soldiers proclaimed on the contrary. Deep in his soul, a fire to fight beside his father against the northern oppressors ignited inside him. 

When he was seven, that fire was extinguished as if an entire oasis had been poured over it. His father was slain by an enemy sword in a skirmish with King Jasson’s army. His father’s body had never been recovered, so he and his mother could never burn it and scatter the ashes with reverence. Ali could only imagine in his nightmares how his father’s blood had seeped into the sand, staining it rusty as an untended blade. Behind his eyelids, he could picture his father’s glassy gaze staring unblinking into a blazing sun until carrion crows pecked out the forever unseeing eyes. Tossing and turning on his sleep mat, he could his father’s flesh picked away until only the bones remained to be buried by the ever advancing dunes. 

The nightmare continued a month later when King Jasson’s troops set fire to the tents of Ali’s tribe. Ali had managed to run to safety—his mother shoving him out of the tent flaps and toward the protective bulk of a sunset red boulder—but his mother hadn’t been so lucky. She had been trapped inside when a mail-clad knight put a torch to Ali’s tent and the goatskin was swallowed in flames and smoke. 

He heard her screams reverberate against the blue bowl of the sky and bit his lip until he tasted iron to resist the temptation to echo her howls, knowing that would ruin his cover and end his screams with the slash of a northern sword across his throat as if he were a sheep to be slaughtered. After what felt like an eternity captured in a hundred rabbiting heartbeats, her shrieks faded into the desert wind, and Ali understood that the gray smoke had suffocated her. 

When the attack at last ended, the northerners leaving fiery devastation and death behind them as their hoofbeats beat like drums across the desert, Ali could find only his mother’s bones charred black amid the wreckage of the tent that had once been their home and refuge. He wept, his tears a salty river streaming down his cheeks. 

That day, he became one of many war orphans entrusted to the charity of his tribe. He received food, water, a sleep mat and blanket, and a long list of chores to complete between sunup and sundown every day. In his leisure time, he no longer liked to listen to stories of battles against the northerners. 

Tales of battles brought him only nightmares instead of the dreams of honor and triumph they once had. Instead, he preferred to listen to the stories spun by the tribe elders every evening around the campfire after the communion with the Voice was finished. He loved to hear the legends of how his people had crossed the Inland Sea to settle this land that wasn’t always barren but was once green and fertile as far as the eye could see, a waving ocean of green grass instead of tan dunes. He felt a connection to a long history that stretched back centuries when he heard stories of how his people had tamed the wild desert horses and how they had mastered the blood-soaked magic of this place. 

He most felt this link to something larger than himself when the Voice, Majid ibn Najm, visited their tribe. Long after the other boys had sought the softness of their sleep mats, Ali would sit cross-legged as the Voice’s words wove the colorful threads of their people’s history as women would a beautiful carpet. 

One night beneath the cool gaze of desert stars, the Voice had leaned toward him, face flickering orange in the firelight, and asked, “You are a war orphan entrusted to the charity of your tribe?” 

The Voice phrased it as a question, but Ali suspected that the Voice knew his life story as he did the life story of every Bazhir. Every night at sunset, Ali had confided his losses and his sorrows to the Voice, knowing that although his voice was a small one, the Voice would still hear it, and that although he was only a tiny grain of sand, he was still part of the rich desert of his people. 

“One of many war orphans in this tribe.” Ali inclined his head in a gesture of deep respect. 

“I will take you back to Persopolis with me, and you will be my student, learning to be the Voice after me. I will expect you to study hard and demonstrate unwavering commitment to this path.” Majid ibn Najm gazed hawkishly at Ali over steepled fingers. “You have no objections to this, I trust?” 

No objections. Ali was too stunned and stupefied by the unmerited favor—the incomprehensible interest in his future—that he had just received from the man who was greatest among his people to object. Struggling to breathe, he stammered, “No objections, but why choose me for this honor?” 

“Because you love the stories of our people and have since your heart began to beat.” The Voice’s weathered face cracked into a smile. “Because the Voice should love the stories of our people so he can pass them to the next generation of Bazhir beneath desert stars.” 

Something in the Voice’s smile gave Ali the courage to ask, “May I bring my kittens with me?” 

Months ago, the wife of the tribe’s best fletcher had been about to drown an unwanted litter of kittens in an oasis. Ali had intervened to save the kittens, promising that he would care for them and take responsibility for them. Since then, the kittens had curled around him as he slept and wrapped around his ankles as if to trip him when he walked. They had been a comfort to him, soft fur for him to coil his fingers and rub his face in, when he cried. Their purrs and meows had become conversation to him, and his table scraps had become meals for them. The Voice would have to know about the kittens because they were such an integral part of his life, and Ali couldn’t imagine how painful it would be to leave them behind when he went to grand city of Persopolis. 

“Of course.” The Voice had reached out to ruffle Ali’s hair with a hand warm as the goat’s milk Ali had heated for his precious kittens. 

Years later in the city of Persopolis that had become his home, Ali sat with cats climbing over him and crawling across the low table he was bending over to write, constantly threatening to spill his inkwell or dabble black paw prints across his parchment. Long ago, Majid ibn Najm had died. His burned body had been scattered beneath desert stars while his spirit lingered inside Ali, who was Voice of the Tribes now. 

As Voice of the Tribes, Ali, his forehead furrowing, now confronted the daunting task of doing what no Voice before him ever had: converting their proud oral tradition into a written one. Since the Bazhir had no written language, that meant translating Bazhir myths into the confining characters of the northern alphabet. Ali shaped every word with care, contemplating each letter before he wrote it neatly. After all, these parchments were intended for the northern prince who had requested a written history of the Bazhir. 

It was a strange request—stranger than anything that had ever come from his purring and meowing cats—but Ali had decided to honor it to the best of his limited abilities. He emptied himself, becoming a mere vessel for the words and experiences of his people to flow through on their journey to the parchment. His bones ached, his joints creaked, his breath rattled in his chest, and Ali knew with every heartbeat that his time was waning like the sickly yellow moon outside his window. 

He would have to hope with every breath and every heartbeat that the northern prince would grant his own humble request to serve as Voice of the Tribes after him. The northern prince had seemed serious and blessed with a keen gaze that saw farther than others when they had spoke in the Sunset Room long ago, and Ali had to believe that he would glimpse the opportunity to bring peace to their peoples and lands. No Bazhir could make war on the Voice, and it was time for the Bazhir to stop making war and start making peace with the northerners. Peace was their only path forward, their only way to survive in a harsh world. 

Once he had hated the northerners for what they had done to his father and his mother, but now the hatred had been leached out of him by the merciless desert sun. Now he placed all his hopes for the future in one northern prince who would have to be strong enough to lead two very different peoples. That was why, late at night, he wrote all the stories he had once listened to in leisure time beneath silver stars to this northern prince he barely knew but had seen in visions of destiny.


End file.
